Last week, President Biden announced his plan to require private employers with 100 or more workers to mandate COVID vaccinations or require workers to be tested weekly. The mechanism to do this is the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (“OSHA”), which is working on an emergency temporary standard (“ETS”). For OSHA to promulgate emergency regulations, it must, according to its website, (1) “determine that workers are in grave danger due to exposure to toxic substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or to new hazards” and (2) “that an emergency standard is needed to protect them.” As a matter of non-constitutional litigation, one can question whether COVID-19 is a “substance or agent” such as DDT ( the first of the modern synthetic insecticide). A virus is a living thing–not something we typically describe as a “substance or agent.” We’ve been living with COVID-19 for approximately two years. Can OSHA argue this is a “new hazard”? Does COVID-19 really count as a “grave danger” to workers when every worker in America, without cost to the worker, can get the vaccine today at a local clinic, and thus reduce the chances of contracting the virus and ensure that if contracted the case will be relatively mild?

In his recent Beacon blog post “Abortion Extremities,” Graham H. Walker cites three tests for human life in the womb: living or dead tissue, human or non-human, and a distinct DNA fingerprint. As he notes, the pre-born entity also has a separate brain, nerve, cardiovascular, digestive, excretory, respiratory, musculoskeletal, immune, endocrine, and reproductive systems. These empirical tests do not exhaust the arguments for the preservation of the pre-born. 

The late Christopher Hitchens, an orthodox atheist and author of God is Not Great, argued that life begins at conception because there is no other place where it can begin. As an atheist, Hitchens had no use for the concept of “ensoulment,” at some point between conception and birth, that allegedly confers full human status. 

Below you will find the con argument in our debate on Roe v. Wade and Abortion. The pro argument, written by James A. Montanye, can be found here.

Are nearly fifty years of precedent enough to insulate the abortion right established in Roe v. Wade from the challenges posed by restrictive new laws in Texas, Mississippi, and elsewhere?

The Texas law is drawing headlines because the U.S. Supreme Court recently declined, apparently on grounds of standing, to hear a first case challenging the law’s ban on abortion after six weeks. President Joe Biden immediately decried the Court’s demurral on the case as the onset of “unconstitutional chaos” requiring a “whole-of-government” response. His alarm about Texas may be overblown, since even staunch opponents of legal abortion, like Sen. David Cassidy (R-La.), predict that the Court may ultimately “destroy” the Texas law due to its novel enforcement mechanism, which prevents the state, but empowers individuals, to sue any person aiding in an illegal abortion.

The real action will come later this term when the Court hears oral arguments in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, in which supporters of legal abortion contest a Mississippi law forbidding abortions when “the probable gestational age of the unborn human” is 15 weeks or more. (Limited exceptions are allowed for medical emergencies or “severe fetal abnormality.”) Mississippi explicitly asks the Court to overturn Roe v. Wade and related decisions. Unlike the Texas case, the Justices have actually accepted this case for full consideration and are expected to rule by the end of June 2022. The Washington Post has sounded the alarm that the Dobbs case “could kill Roe. v. Wade.”

This piece is the pro argument in our two-post debate on Roe v. Wade and Abortion. You can find the con argument, written by Graham H. Walker in response to this piece, here.

The Supreme Court’s decision to hear an appeal from Mississippi’s restrictive abortion law raises questions and concerns regarding the longstanding desire among conservative justices, jurists, politicians, and church groups to overturn the Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade opinion. That opinion constrained the power of States to infringe upon a woman’s due-process “right” to choose abortion. Reconsideration of Roe by the Court’s present “conservative” majority could upend nearly fifty years of deftly circumscribed individual liberty by granting States greater latitude—as Mississippi’s attorneys assert—to “promote women’s health and preserve the dignity and sanctity of life” by restricting abortion beyond present limits.

The Court once again will pit the legal rule of stare decisis against jurisprudential and moral claims that Roe was falsely reasoned and wrongly decided. Two opposing concepts of individual liberty are at issue. The first is former Justice Anthony Kennedy’s classical-liberal dictum in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, 505 U.S. 833, 851 (1992): “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” The second concept is conservative Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s curiously progressive characterization of aborted fetuses as “unborn victims.”

Literally on 9/11/01 and throughout the 20 culture-destroying years since, the Independent Institute has stood hard and fast for the difficult but essential principles that undergird liberty, human dignity, and the rule of law.

While many whom we had thought shared our devotion to liberty were doing things like removing the word “Peace” from their mastheads and calling for “sand to be turned into silicon,” (that is, nuking the desert countries), we were among the precious few responsible voices calling for responses in accordance with peaceful, prosperous and free societies, grounded in a commitment to human worth and dignity.

Here’s a recap of some of those efforts:

Academic institutions increasingly are recognizing the importance of entrepreneurship to the performance of an economy, and in response, many (including my own institution, Florida State University) have established entrepreneurship programs to give students some skills that can help them succeed as entrepreneurs. I’m supportive of these efforts, but the degree to which individuals in an economy are entrepreneurial is affected more by an economy’s institutions than by characteristics of individual entrepreneurs.

Some economies are more entrepreneurial than others.

The trust fund that sustains a large portion of the Social Security benefits American seniors rely upon will run out of money in 2033. The trust fund will be depleted a year earlier than forecast a year ago.

That’s the verdict of Social Security’s trustees, who point to the “precipitous” effect of the coronavirus pandemic as the cause. Here’s the money quote describing the negative impact from their 2021 report:

The OASI Trust Fund and the DI Trust Fund are projected to have sufficient reserves to pay full benefits on time until 2033 and 2057, respectively. Legislative action will be needed to prevent reserve depletion in those years. In the absence of such legislation, continuing income to the trust funds at the time of reserve depletion would be sufficient to pay 76 percent of OASI benefits and 91 percent of DI benefits.

America’s chaotic exit from Afghanistan put the world spotlight back on global terrorism. The poorly executed departure has inspired radical Islamic terrorist groups to launch new attacks on Western nations as well as Afghanis unaligned with the goals of global terrorists. Rather than a retreat from the War on Terror, however, Western nations appear to be entering a new phase.

As pundits debate whether the US should have stayed in Afghanistan, three recent narrative films – The Outpost, Sérgio, and Eye in the Sky – stand out as stories that speak to the complexities of militarist approaches to the terrorist threat. All three films – two based on real events or people and one fictional – dive deep into the human cost of the War on Terror. They often raise more questions than they answer.

Last week in Alabama Assoc. of Realtors v. HHS (2o21), the Supreme Court (with three liberal justices dissenting) held that federal statutory law did not allow the CDC to impose a nationwide eviction moratorium. In essence, the CDC criminalized landlords pursuing the eviction process in state courts. The CDC relied on the following statute in imposing the moratorium:

The Surgeon General, with the approval of the [Secretary of Health and Human Services], is authorized to make and enforce such regulations as in his judgment are necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases from foreign countries into the States or possessions, or from one State or possession into any other State or possession. For purposes of carrying out and enforcing such regulations, the Surgeon General may provide for such inspection, fumigation, disinfection, sanitation, pest extermination, destruction of animals or articles found to be so infected or contaminated as to be sources of dangerous infection to human beings, and other measures, as in his judgment may be necessary.

The scamming of pandemic unemployment relief benefits is now being described as “the biggest fraud ever perpetrated against the U.S.” by private security experts. What’s really scary is that it may not yet be over.

The story is back in the news because those experts have done more work to identify where the money has gone instead of to the unemployed Americans to whom it was intended. NBC reports: